


The Multiverse Theory

by aph_pasta



Series: Que Será, Será [5]
Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Alternate Universe - Space, F/M, Super far into the future, Takes place in like the year 4000, genetically modified humans
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-02
Updated: 2019-10-20
Packaged: 2020-02-16 03:05:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 11,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18682864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aph_pasta/pseuds/aph_pasta
Summary: Infinite universes, infinite possibilities.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Uh wow, I'm on a huge scifi kick. To understand this fic, you probably want to understand the Higgs field, dark matter, and dark energy. Here are some videos/resources that explain it in a pretty simple way.  
> Higgs field: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joTKd5j3mzk  
> Dark matter & dark energy: https://youtu.be/z3rgl-_a5C0
> 
> Enjoy!

For centuries, people had already known the Earth was dying. It was going the same way Mars once had, losing first its magnetosphere, then its atmosphere, then its molten liquid core. By the time enough people actually began to care, it was impossible to go outside without putting on an anti-uv suit, so the sun’s radiation wouldn’t fry your cells to a crisp. At that point, it was too late to do anything for the planet, so people started to branch out, searching for other places where their lives would be comparatively better. 

 

Those who were left were generally considered to be absolutely crazy. Why would anyone choose to stay on a dying, nearly uninhabitable planet, when there were so many other ones to go to.

 

That was exactly why Iszabella was leaving. She’d been tethered to the Earth until the age of 17, since the caretakers refused to leave and she was legally required to stay under their guardianship. In the entire year leading up to her emancipation, she’d prepared in secret, fixing up an abandoned starship until she at least didn’t have to worry about it exploding on launch, and learning how to drive it from whatever audio tapes she could scrounge up. 

 

There probably were more detailed instructions to be found in written form, but for obvious reasons, one couldn’t find starship manuals written in braille. Iszabella didn’t care much, though, because as long as she was able to get off the ground and steer the ship towards its new destination, she would be fine. She planned to go out into the Kuiper belt, maybe somewhere like Pluto that wasn’t all that densely populated. Really, she just wanted to get away.

 

As soon as Iszabella was a hundred percent sure it was midnight and the caretakers could do nothing if they saw her escaping, she gathered up the last of her belongings into a little drawstring bag and plucked her stuffed horse off her bed. She felt around the wall until she found the ledge under the window, pushed back the blinds, and carefully shimmied out of it. Iszabella had done this enough times to know exactly how far the drop was, but she still let out a small squeak when her feet hit the ground. For a moment, she stood completely still, listening for any sign that she’d disturbed someone in the house. All around her was the silence of the night, punctuated only by the soft buzzing of electricity and things. She carefully shifted to the side until she could walk along with one hand on the house’s rough brick foundation. The starship was in a ditch a few hundred yards from the house and she’d memorized the path well, but she couldn’t afford to be overconfident now and make a mistake.

 

The ship was easy to find, because it was massive enough to create quite a collection of Higgs bosons that permeated the relative darkness with clouds of grey. Upon reaching the ship, Iszabella pulled herself in through the small hatch on the side and shut it carefully behind her. She pulled on the handle just below the indent of a window, until she heard the soft smack of the door suctioning completely. She’d still have to activate the airlock once the ship was powered on so she wouldn’t lose cabin pressure.

 

The cockpit of the ship was very small, and most of the space was taken up by the belongings Iszabella had brought with her. She had enough food to last herself a few weeks, a wallet full of all the money she’d earned from her evening job at the Shop n’ Go, a collection of tapes with music, books, and starship manuals loaded on to them, two clean anti-uv suits, an EVA suit, and a plastic bag stuffed with toiletries. The drawstring bag she’d brought went in the back along with these things and she held on to her stuffed animal as she climbed up front, pushing back a bundle of wires so she could reach the seat. 

 

By now, the flutters of nervousness in Iszabella’s stomach had turned to a burning sensation, and she kept wondering if she should maybe just turn back, but something kept her going. She strapped the safety belt first over her chest, then over her lap and clipped it in. She reached up until her hands brushed something rubber, and she pulled down a heavy oxygen mask. It was the old kind, which fighter pilots had used in the terra wars many decades ago, but she’d just had to clean it out and give it new wiring, and it was good as new. She’d refilled the ship’s oxygen tanks the night before, and had enough to last herself a few days. Plus, the ship would automatically filter carbon dioxide back into oxygen, constantly replenishing her supply. Iszabella pulled the oxygen mask over the lower half of her face and pulled the rubber straps tight until it was nearly uncomfortable. Next came a set of goggles to protect her eyes and a headset, which would mostly serve to protect her ears from the din of takeoff.

 

Iszabella found the rocket’s ignition, which she had marked with one dot of hot glue. She turned the key and the hum of electricity came through the ship. She traced her fingers on the dashboard until she felt two dots of glue, and pressed the button, which began pressurizing the cabin. A series of beeps came through her headset, getting closer and closer together until there was just one long beep to signal that the cabin was pressurized. She turned the ignition key a whole 90 degrees, holding in a breath and praying for a moment that it would work. She’d never fully started the starship up before, because once it was started, she had no choice but to fly. The engines coughed and groaned, but moments later emitted a loud roar. Iszabella could feel the entire ship vibrating around her. She wondered if the caretakers had been awoken by the noise, and if they were coming out to investigate. She couldn’t care less.

 

Iszabella brought both of her hands down the dashboard until she was gripping the yoke. The tips of her toes rested against the pedals on the ground and she slammed her foot down on the one on the right. She pulled the yoke back, thumbs resting on the buttons on each side, and felt the ship pull up, jolting forward and rocketing off into the atmosphere. 

 

Strangely enough, Iszabella found it easier to discern her surroundings the farther away she was from Earth. Objects were easy to make out against the background of microwaves and dark matter, because even the smallest shard of glass became a solid gray spot, rocketing through the atmosphere at thousands of miles per hour. Layers of space junk had clumped around Earth, crashing into each other and creating massive cosmic landfills that would orbit and orbit until gravity eventually pulled them in and sent them crashing to the planet’s fields of rocks and oil-spotted ocean carcasses. 

 

Every time one of these piles of space junk came near, Iszabella noticed it before her radar could even start beeping to alert her to its presence. She maneuvered easily enough away from the Earth. All she had to do was twist the yoke side to side to avoid whatever was coming her way. It didn’t matter which direction she went, as long as she was going up.

 

Once she had cleared the atmosphere, Iszabella readjusted her path so she would pass far from the moon. Even though she was of age and wasn’t technically breaking any rules, she still feared that the caretakers would send out a notice that she’d gone missing, and a terra wars-era starship puttering through the sky wasn’t hard to miss.

 

Her first day of travel passed by quickly, but she found that she was much too nervous to sleep or eat anything. Since her course was set until she passed the moon, there wasn’t much to do, except click one of the audio tapes into the starship’s reader and listen to the crackling voice of B. J. Harrison read  _ Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland _ .

 

Iszabella passed her days this way, clicking in tapes, each older than the next, and listening to long gone people read stories that took her off to faraway lands. One story she enjoyed in particular was Andy Weir’s  _ The Martian _ . It was difficult for her to wrap her head around the idea that Mars had once been a barren, lifeless place, like Earth was destined to become. She’d been to Mars once, on a school trip when she had been a child, and she remembered visiting the labs of various scientists, where the newest innovations were being made. Mars was one of the most technologically advanced parts of the solar system and was covered in lush flora and oceans for miles and miles around. Sometimes, when she listened to  _ The Martian _ , Iszabella wondered if it was written about a fake world, somewhere that had never existed and had just been dreamed up by someone with too much time on their hands.

 

When she flew by Mars, Iszabella was overwhelmed with radio signals bouncing back and forth from the planet, and she sat and listened to them, decoding the data as best as she could with the basic skills she’d been taught in school. It was interesting to see how these humans with their top of the line technology and constant connection to everyone else were spending their days. She picked up a signal for a TV news channel and listened to it until she was so far away that the words faded into unintelligible static. There was no mention of Earth, almost as though it didn’t exist. Instead, the anchor talked on and on about the ongoing work to replace Dyson Sphere panels damaged by solar winds and the election for a new officer of biochemical weaponry in the Galilei sector of Venus. 

 

Flying through the asteroid belt was likely the most dangerous part of Iszabella’s voyage. The closer she came, the more and more signals she picked up from decimated spacecraft that had been hit by something or somehow dragged into orbit. Many of the instructional tapes warned of the difficulty of crossing, and Iszabella spent hours sitting a few hundred miles from the nearest asteroids, waiting for the window that would give her enough space to blast through. When this came, she fired up a set of secondary booster rockets and shoved the yoke forward, pressing the accelerator so hard it brushed against the floor of the ship. There was a tremendous boom as the ship broke the sound barrier and Iszabella squeezed her eyes shut and held her breath until the radar stopped letting out urgent beeps in her ear and she was through. 

 

When she was sure she was safe, Iszabella took one hand off of the yoke and leaned forward enough to touch the dashboard. She’d broken the glass over the fuel gauge specifically so she could feel where the arrow was at, and she slipped her finger into the hole, finding the little metal arrow and tracing its position relative to the bar of black plastic just above the full side of the gauge. Firing the booster rockets had used much more fuel than she’d expected, and she was beginning to run low. No alarms had gone off yet, so she knew she was safe, but it was still best to find fuel as quickly as possible. 

 

In this part of the solar system, refueling stations were few and far between. The planets here were mostly uninhabitable and instead used for resource mining, which meant machines outnumbered humans nearly twenty to one. She wouldn’t reach Jupiter for about another three-hundred-thousand kilometers, so she would have to look closer. To save fuel, Iszabella powered the engines down and just allowed the ship to be carried forward by the residual push of her previous acceleration. This was a comfortable speed, and it allowed Iszabella to listen to three more books as she sailed along, lazily watching for any sign of a refueling station or other sort of man-made object. 

 

It was two days before Iszabella got any sign of something else. She saw a disturbance in the Higgs field far away and powered the engines back up so she could turn towards it. It came closer, and she wondered if it was another ship that she could possibly ask for some extra fuel from. 

 

It wasn’t long before something weird started happening. Iszabella usually paid no attention to patterns in dark energy, because it always went in the same way and had blended into the background for her, but now a rippling had started right in front of her, waves of energy pushing in to each other then snapping out, all around a central point. She pulled back on the yoke, twisting it to the side to try to pull away. The beeping from the radar began to go haywire, before breaking off into obnoxiously loud static. Iszabella pulled harder on the yoke, silently begging the ship to move.

 

She felt a violent jolt and heard the blaring of an alarm, then she couldn’t feel anything at all.

 

\--

 

There was something constricting wrapped around Iszabella’s chest. Her left arm wouldn’t move, and her shoulder ached when she tried. She blinked a few times and rubbed at her eyes, which were stinging. Every breath burned from her throat into her lungs and her heart started pounding when she realized she had no idea where she was. She was laying down, and whatever was beneath her didn’t feel at all like the cracked leather seat of her starship. Even the air around her felt different, somehow crisper. 

 

“You’re finally up! I was starting to think you were in a coma or something.”

 

Iszabella grunted and tried to find the source of the voice. It was deep and rough, definitely a man’s, and it was from somewhere behind her. She was inside something much more massive than whoever had spoken, so all she could see was an uninterrupted expanse of gray. 

 

“You speak English, right?” the voice had a strange accent, nothing like anything she’d ever heard before.

 

“Y-yeah,” she mumbled, feeling around next to her, searching for something she could grab onto to pull herself up. She let out a yelp when she felt something around her waist being unclipped, and a pair of hands on her arms, gently pushing her into a sitting position. Her back was resting against something hard, but there was nothing on either side of her, and when she swung her feet, they didn’t hit anything.

 

“I’m honestly surprised you’re not dead. It’s really rare that someone survives exposure to space.”

 

“I… I what?” Iszabella turned her head, trying to figure out where the other person was, but gasped sharply when she felt searing pain spider out from the back of her neck to her shoulder. 

 

She could feel the man move around her, and assumed he was facing her now. She could hear him tapping his fingers against something metal, and she could sense him hesitating. “I guess it makes sense you wouldn’t remember what happened,” he murmured, almost as though talking to himself.

 

“What happened?” she asked, her heart pounding even faster.

 

“You crashed into my ship. You just came out of nowhere, and I felt it in the whole cabin. Some alarm started going off and you were lucky you were so close to the airlock, because I was able to open it and steer to the side so I could grab you. I didn’t get any of your stuff, though. Most of it blew up and I didn’t want to risk trying to go back for anything.”

 

Iszabella sucked in a breath and puffed out her cheeks. She didn’t care much about most of her belongings, but she’d worked so hard to earn all that money and she would miss the tapes of her books, and then there was that one thing that she had made absolute sure to take with her- “there was a little horse, a toy one. Are you sure you didn’t get that?” 

 

“A horse?”

 

Some of the tightness in Iszabella’s chest went away and she nodded encouragingly. “Yeah, a horse.”

 

“What’s a horse?”

 

The tightness came back and Iszabella shook her head. She’d forgotten that very few knew about the old Earth animals, as they’d gone extinct so many centuries ago. Horses themselves had just become obsolete as everyone was able to get cars and eventually their own starships, and they had just died off when humans stopped caring for them. Iszabella only knew of them from lessons at school and one of her books:  _ Black Beauty _ . 

 

“Never mind.” she said, though she really did mind. She decided, instead, to focus on the good things. At least she was still alive. “Thank you for saving me.”

 

She imagined that the man must have been smiling. When he responded, his voice carried the characteristic lilt of someone who was casually happy. “No problem. I’m just glad you’re okay… uh, what’s your name?”

 

“Iszabella.”

 

“Well, Iszabella, I’m glad you’re okay.” He reached out and gently shook her hand. She didn’t make any effort to return the gesture because her arm hurt so much, but she offered him a small smile. “I’m Gilbert. Let me know if you need anything, okay?”

 

“Okay.”

 

They lapsed into silence and Iszabella closed her eyes, feeling suddenly exhausted from the exertion of the conversation. The soft hum of the ship’s engines in the background and the sound of the man whispering to himself as he worked around the ship lulled her back to sleep.

 

When she awoke again, Iszabella smelled the distinctive odor of a readymeal, which was something like a cross between burnt meat and baby powder. She’d never liked those, but her stomach couldn’t help but growl at the thought of eating something. She found the buckle across her lap and ran her fingers over it until she found the clasp and undid it. It was very easy to move around without gravity weighing her down, but her body still ached down to her very bones and the awkward way her left side was bandaged, as well as the completely unfamiliar surroundings, made it extremely difficult to get anywhere.

 

“Gilbert?” she yelled, reaching out in an attempt to find something solid to grab on to. “Where are you?”

 

His voice came from far away, somewhere across and to her right. “I’m over here. What are you looking for?”

 

Iszabella found a handle and pushed against it, turning herself around to face where she assumed he was. “I smelled food. Can I have some?”

 

This time, when Gilbert spoke, his voice was closer. “Sure. Catch.” She heard the soft rustle of something being grabbed and assumed he’d thrown something her way. She had no idea where that something was, so she just reached out, waving her hand in front of her to try to find the packet of food. “What the hell are you doing? I didn’t even throw anything at you yet. I have to heat this up still.” Gilbert sounded confused and Iszabella gave a nervous laugh and pulled her hand back to her side. “It’s like you can’t even see two feet in front of you.”

 

Iszabella tried to hold back her tongue, but she’d always been sensitive about this exact thing. She couldn’t help but blurt, “It’s not like that!” and smack her hand over her mouth once she’d realized what she’d said.

 

“It’s not like what?” Gilbert’s voice was laced with suspicion and she felt him come closer to her, waving what must have been his hand in front of her face. She flinched back and felt her cheeks heat up. 

 

“Wait- I can-”

 

“They let blind people drive starships here?” Gilbert yelled, completely aghast. Iszabella grit her teeth, both out of anger and so she wouldn’t say anything else stupid. “No wonder you crashed in to me. You have no idea where the fuck you’re going, do you?”

 

Iszabella shook her head and pressed the heel of her palm against her forehead. There was no use even trying to explain herself. 

 

Gilbert let out a frustrated huff. “I’m not going to shoot you out of the airlock. That would be a dick move. I’m dropping you off at the nearest inhabited planet I find, though. And then I’m getting out of here. I’m not risking some other blind idiot crashing into me and destroying my ship.”


	2. Chapter 2

Gilbert assumed that Iszabella was trying to orient herself within the ship. She floated around, her uninjured hand pressed first against the control panel, then against the wall. She left handprints on the windows and many times, Gilbert snapped at her when she was feeling around panels of buttons and levers in the cockpit. He worried she would press or move something and they would rocket out into empty space or depressurize. 

 

Iszabella didn't attempt at all to make conversation, and Gilbert was more than alright with that. From the brief times when they had spoken, he gathered that she was absolutely insane. She'd tried asking him about some horse thing that he doubted even existed, seeing as she refused to describe it any further once he told her he didn't know what it was. And she was completely blind and had piloted a starship. She was a risk, and she needed to be safely on the ground, somewhere where she wouldn't be able to get on another starship and crash into someone else.

 

Gilbert tried to ignore her. Or at least, he treated her as much like a pet as one possibly could while still being humane. When she asked for food, he heated up a readymeal and put it right in her hand so it wouldn’t go floating off. When his clock told him another day had passed, he strapped her into a chair and changed the heavy layer of bandages over her upper body. 

 

Four days passed, then five, and Gilbert was even more lost than he had been at first. He knew some sort of planet had to be nearby, as Iszabella obviously came from one. All he’d found so far, though, were rocky clumps only a few hundred miles across, which had no signs of being inhabited. He’d briefly entertained the thought of landing on one of those and deploying a habitent for Iszabella to live in until she could signal help from someone else, but that would be cruel, and from what he’d seen, there was no one anywhere near them for her to signal.

 

He kept going, blocking out the ever-present shadow of Iszabella wandering through his ship. She asked him once about books, specifically some sort of Alice thing. She brought up the horse thing again, too, asking if he could maybe find a book about those things on a readscreen. He responded by telling her he had no idea what a readscreen was, and for her to stop fucking talking to him. 

 

She’d shrunk off into the back corner of the ship, and for a little, Gilbert thought he’d heard crying, but then again that could have just been the engines. After all, he was cycling them between max power and no power, so he could maintain a fast speed without using too much fuel, and could turn whenever he needed to.

 

After that, Iszabella stopped asking about books and horses and things, and just kept to herself. Part of Gilbert felt bad for pushing her away, but he was constantly reminded of how much of a risk she was, and he blamed her for sending him off-course and forcing him to change the plans he’d made long before he started his journey. 

 

Once Iszabella seemed to have gotten over having been yelled at, she went back to exploring the ship. When she was floating by the ceiling, feeling around the layers of insulation, she grabbed onto a strange handle, and felt that it was surrounded by panels of glass and steel. “Why’s there a hatch up here? I thought that went against the interstellar decree of proper starship construction?” she asked, and flipped over to hook her toes under the handle and hang upside-down. 

 

“It’s what?” Gilbert asked tiredly. 

 

“It’s unsafe. If there’s an impact from above, your radar might not activate soon enough and the hatch could be pushed open and cause you to depressurize.”

 

Gilbert shrugged, then realized Iszabella couldn’t see him do so, and replied, “I’ll be fine. This is the newest model of starship there is. It’s the safest thing ever.”

 

Iszabella furrowed her brow and kicked off of the ceiling, going towards where she expected Gilbert to be, seated at the front control panel. “I’m surprised they would allow a ship to be made that way. I guess the Mars developers must be getting a bit more relaxed.”

 

“Mars?” Gilbert echod.

 

“Yeah. You’re from there, aren’t you? I assumed you would be with this kind of technology.”

 

Gilbert sighed and shook his head. “No. I’m from Erdboden.”

 

“If that’s your idea of a joke, it’s not funny.” 

 

“No. I’m serious.”

 

Iszabella still wasn’t convinced. She crossed her arms over her chest, and rolled her eyes. “Okay, wise guy, where is this Erbudden place?”

 

“It’s pronounced Erdboden, and it’s located in the Sternen system, between Tuisto and Alcis.”

 

Iszabella tuned away and pushed off the back of Gilbert’s chair with her free hand. She was sick of him joking around with her, and at this point had decided she was better off not even trying to be friendly to him or try to talk to him. She was surprised, though, when she heard the click of Gilbert’s seatbelt, and a few seconds later felt him tap her shoulder. 

 

“I’m completely serious. It’s all in a different universe, and I guess you guys aren’t advanced enough to have discovered us yet. Or well, you might know that there are other universes, but you just haven’t found us in particular.”

 

“You’re… from another universe?” Iszabella asked cautiously. She still didn’t believe Gilbert. She’d grown up learning that humans were the only advanced life forms there were. Microbial life had been found in abundance throughout the galaxy, but nothing had evolved past that. There were traces of lost civilizations from the past in the forms of radio signals, many of which had been decoded and shown to be cries for help. These were hundreds of light years away, though, too far away to send anything or anyone back before whatever was there was destroyed.

 

In school, her teacher had briefly mentioned a theory regarding the existence of multiple universes and multiple dimensions, but that’s all it was: a theory. 

 

Iszabella turned around and reached out, until she’d grabbed Gilbert’s chin in her hand. He yelped and tried to wiggle away, but she held on tight.

 

“Ow! That’s my face! You’re hurting me!”

 

“Oh really. It feels more like a butt,” Iszabella replied sarcastically. She roughly felt over the outline of Gilbert’s face, then traced to find a pair of lips, a nose, and two normal sized eyes. She didn’t find anything out of the ordinary, at least compared to humans who weren’t modified to have things like five eyes or a layer of scales to protect their skin. “You seem like a person to me. How many arms do you have?”

 

“Two.”

 

“And legs?”

 

“Two. But I don’t see why that’s important.”

 

“It’s important because it proves you’re lying to me. If you were really from another universe, you wouldn’t be human.”

 

Gilbert sighed and swatted at Iszabella’s hand until she took it away from his face. “Infinite universes, infinite possibilities. There’s an infinite possibility that any given universe will have the exact same life forms in it that another one does.”

 

“As far as I’m concerned, that’s all bullshit. If there were really like, infinite universes, then there would be one where I never crashed into your stupid fucking ship and got to go to Pluto and live there like I’d planned to.”

 

“There is one. There’s also some universe out there where you’re an elephant and I’m a crab. We probably won’t find it, but it’s definitely out there.”

 

“Okay, fine,” Iszabella huffed. “Let’s say you’re telling the truth. How the hell did you get here?”

 

“Warp hyperdrive. It uses matter-antimatter collisions to rip through the fabric of space and time. Pretty awesome, right?”

 

Iszabella raised her eyebrows, her lips pressed into a thin line. “If there really is a warp hyperdrive thing on this ship, then how come I’ve never found it?”

 

“It’s hidden.”

 

“That’s the kind of thing a liar would say.”

 

“No, seriously. There’s a lever just above the acceleration pedal that you push down if you want to start using collision fuel. Here, I’ll show you so you believe me.” Gilbert grabbed Iszabella’s hand and pulled her back to the control panel. He squatted down and pressed her hand against the gas pedal, then moved it up to rest against the small lever. She stayed still for a moment, before darting out her fingers and starting to push the lever down. Gilbert roughly yanked her hand away and pulled her back so forcefully that they were shot halfway across the ship. “Are you insane?” he shrieked. “You would have put us in another universe!”

 

“Yeah! That would have proved that you’re right,” Iszabella replied, voice soured with annoyance. 

 

“You idiot! You would have gotten yourself stuck there. There’s a one out of infinity probability that you will be able to return to a universe you’ve already been to. You might as well say it’s impossible!”

 

Iszabella let out a huff and ran a hand through her hair. “Okay, fine. Even though it’s really impossible for me to fully believe you, for the sake of not complicating things further, I’ll pretend you’re telling the truth. Now, mister alternate universe, will you explain to me why you decided to start travelling to other universes, especially if it’s apparently impossible for you to get back to yours?”

 

Gilbert grinned, and said, “finally,” under his breath. “I’m a test pilot. The warp hyperdrive was developed thirty years ago, and we had to work out some kinks, but I’m the first person to fly with it!”

 

“You had… to work out some kinks?”

 

“Yeah. The fuel explosions weren’t controlled well enough at first, and they would make the whole ship explode. It turns out that the fuel tank needs to be placed underneath the ship and be partially external, with graphene and lonsdaleite layers outside of it.”

 

“So… you risked your life just to lose your life as you knew it and be transported to another universe without the ability to get back to your own?”

 

“Uh… yeah?”

 

“And you’re calling me insane?” Iszabella gave a short, exasperated laugh. 

 

“You’re a different kind of insane. I did this because then, I would be the first person to travel outside my universe. I’m a hero now. I’m a legend.”

 

“So you did this… because you’re a narcissist and want attention.”

 

Gilbert was about to snap at her, but he saw the ends of her lips turn up in a joking smile. “I’m kidding. I think it’s kind of cool. It’s brave.” 

 

Gilbert grinned proudly. “Yeah. I’m exploring places no one has gone before. Or at least, no one where I’m from. I’m typing all my research into a coder and it’s being sent to a duplicate at the lab where my starship was built. Of course, it only transmits when I leave a universe and enter the next one, because that’s just the nature of space and time. What I’ve seen is really interesting, though. I’ve been to the fourth dimension. It took some getting used to, you feel things around you in an entirely different way.”

 

This piqued Iszabella’s interest and she asked, “where else have you been?”

 

Gilbert started in on a story about a universe that seemed to be nearing the end of its life, where everything around him was dark and dead, except for neutron stars far off in the distance, floating toward each other and spinning faster and faster in a deadly dance until they collided. He tried his best to explain how it had looked, but Iszabella still felt lost, because she had no concept of the colors he was describing.

 

For the first time since they’d properly met, Gilbert didn’t feel a nagging anger at Iszabella, and she didn’t feel unhappy and unwanted. They floated at the top of the starship for hours, Gilbert talking about his journey.


	3. Chapter 3

Iszabella sat at the controls near Gilbert and fidgeted with the rough end of her seatbelt, just to have something to do. She assumed they were in front of the window, but everything was empty and black. She wondered how far she’d been thrown off course, and if Gilbert even knew where he was going. Maybe by now, they had passed Pluto and the Kuiper belt and the very edge of the solar system, and were floating out towards the Oort Cloud, into nothingness. The thought scared her, but she also knew it wasn’t like anyone would miss her if she disappeared. And life was short anyway, so maybe she might as well live it to the fullest and just explore. At least she wouldn’t be rotting away on Earth, spending her days in the Caretakers’ wasteland.

 

One thing that all of the scientists and modders had never been able to do was make people immortal. Humans lived longer than ever before, nearly two hundred years at best, and they aged slower and less noticeably. The oldest person ever had lived to four hundred and thirteen, but in the last seventy or so years of their life, they had been, for lack of a better word, a vegetable. As humans lived longer and longer, the downsides of this became more and more apparent, and suddenly anyone who was searching for the key to immortality was considered crazy.

 

Iszabella herself, in the relatively short seventeen years she’d been alive so far, had decided that she didn’t want to live for hundreds and hundreds of years. She worried that life would eventually become monotonous and like a chore. If she was going to live, she wanted to do it quick and make the most of it.

 

“Hey, Gilbert. How old are you?” she asked, just out of curiosity.

 

“6,978 rotations. Well, before I left. I stopped counting after that.”

 

“You… measure your age in day-”

 

Iszabella was cut off when the ship lurched to the side and started tipping. The wind was knocked out of her and she flailed her arms around, trying to make sure she was still strapped to her seat. Even in zero-g, she could feel when the ship wasn’t oriented the way it was supposed to be. 

 

She unclipped her seatbelt and reached out to find a point of reference. Her hand landed on a pipe bolted to the wall, which she knew she could follow to just below the right-side window. That was the side of the ship that was tilted down. She pushed on the pipe and kept the tips of her fingers on it as she floated by, to keep herself going the right direction. Once she felt the pipe taper off and turn back into the wall of the ship, she placed her palms flat against the wall and moved them up, until the wall jutted out into a ledge and her fingers brushed cold glass. She twisted to the side and looked ahead, seeing wisps of grey on the very edge of the blackness. 

 

As she tilted herself backwards and more to the side, the grey got deeper and deeper, until there was so much of it that it made Iszabella’s eyes water. There were swirls of mass being jetted out in all directions, and everything was turning so fast it made her head spin. She shut her eyes and turned her back to the window, so she was back to comforting blackness.

 

“Gilbert, this is going to sound crazy,” she started, then swallowed and nervously ran a hand through her hair. “You have to turn the way the ship is going.” She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to remember everything  _ The Voyager’s Emergency Handbook _ had told her about black holes. “Uh… accelerate, go to the highest speed your ship can handle.”

 

Gilbert’s voice came from far away, from the other side of the ship, and it was strained from the effort it took for him to keep the yoke upright, as it had started to tilt right on its own. “Are you fucking crazy? You’re going to get us killed.”

 

“I told you it would sound crazy,” Iszabella sighed. She kicked off the wall, floating closer to him. “I’m dead serious, though. You just have to listen to me. Trust me, please.” If she was on Earth, she would have been on her knees, begging. For the first time in her life, she was terrified that she was going to die. 

 

“Why the hell should I trust you?” Gilbert grunted. Just a few seconds later, Iszabella heard him scream, “no!” as he lost control of the yoke and it slipped out of his hands, turning sharply as far right as it could go. The ship was being pulled down, and Iszabella’s heart was pounding so fast she couldn’t tell when one beat ended and the next began.

 

“Press the yoke forward and accelerate, goddamnit!” she screamed. If she had had the use of both her arms, she would have done it herself, but she just didn’t have the strength.

 

For a moment, everything was quiet. Then, the ship jolted forward so fast that Iszabella was slammed against the back of it. There was a sharp pain in the back of her head, and a cacophony of deep rumbles and high pitched squeals assaulted her ears. She felt like her body was being compressed and stretched out all at once. She wanted to scream, but she felt as though someone was stepping on her throat.

 

As soon as it started, it stopped. Iszabella groaned as she floated back up into the center of the ship. Her entire body was aching again, worse this time. It took a massive amount of effort just to go back to where she had been sitting next to Gilbert at the controls.

 

He was completely silent, and for a while, Iszabella wondered if maybe he’d died. She leaned over and gently nudged his shoulder, and he made a little startled noise, so now she knew he was at least alive. For a while, the only sounds that came from him were his breathing and the soft mechanical creaking from his hands moving the yoke. 

 

When he finally spoke, it was to ask, “how did you know what was there?”

 

Iszabella bit her lip and shrugged. “I could see it.”

 

“Yeah, right.” Gilbert snorted and turned back to the controls.

 

“No. I’m serious.”

 

“You’re blind.”

 

“Yeah, I know,” Iszabella said. “I can’t see light. So I guess I don’t see what you and everyone else sees. I see on a different wavelength. I don’t even know what it is, but like, I can tell when something is really massive because I can see what it does to the universe. Like black holes take the universe and twist it around and bunch it up so there’s so much universe that you can’t see where it ends.”

 

“You expect me to believe that?”

 

Iszabella crossed her arms over her chest and huffed. “Did I or did I not just save your life?”

 

“Okay. Fine. I’ll pretend to believe you, just to shut you up. Are you happy now?”

 

Iszabella nodded.

 

They were back to flying on in complete silence. Iszabella was bored out of her mind. She tried to force herself to sleep, just to pass the time, and when she was awake, she’d circle the ship over and over again, hoping to maybe find something that she hadn’t seen before. By now, she’d just assumed that Gilbert was completely lost, and she knew that she wouldn’t be able to redirect him, because she couldn’t see where they were. The only way she’d be able to orient them was if she found some sort of landmark, and as far as she knew, there was no black hole inside her solar system. 

 

When Gilbert came to hand her a readymeal, Iszabella could still feel his presence, and she could sense apprehension, like he was holding his breath. She pretended not to notice him at all and just twisted the top off of the little pouch so she could squeeze out some of the paste and take a bite.

 

“Can I ask you something?”

 

Iszabella sighed. “What?”

 

“Why are you blind?”

 

“What the hell kind of a question is that?”

 

“No, no, I didn’t mean it like that,” Gilbert slapped his palm against his forehead, “I meant why can’t you see light, but you can see other stuff?”

 

“That’s still an insensitive question to ask.”

 

Iszabella heard Gilbert let out a loud huff.

 

“Like hundreds of years ago or so, people started changing babies’ genes. They had good intentions, or at least that’s what the history books say. There was this scientist, Williams or something. He was the first person to edit a baby’s genes, and this baby was born on Mars and could live in the cold and radiation, back when the planet was like that. After that, people started making these babies that could survive on the other planets with less oxygen and heat and more radiation. At first I guess they had good intentions.”

 

Iszabella paused and crossed her arm over her chest, leaning her shoulders in as much as she could. She could feel her cheeks heating up.

 

“Then people just started doing whatever they pleased to babies. It was like we- they were dress up dolls. There were wars over this, and the genmods won, and so it just became legal to do whatever you wanted. Of course, there were a lot of babies who didn’t turn out right because people didn’t know what they were doing or wanted to try something new and I guess no one gave a shit what would happen to the people whose lives they were experimenting on.”

 

She swallowed down bitter anger and made her hands into fists so her nails dug little bloody crescents into her palm. 

 

“I think it’s cool, though. You can see black holes.”

 

“You don’t fucking get it, do you?” Iszabella snapped.

 

“Okay. No. I don’t.”

 

Iszabella sighed and took a deep breath, then another. She was used to people not understanding. It seemed like everyone she’d ever met on Earth who wasn’t a FURG and everyone on her school trips to mars didn’t get it. She was considered a necessary sacrifice for an overall better species, an outlier in a series of perfect trials.

 

“Just listen to me. It’s bad. It’s bad when this kind of stuff happens. I’m lucky. There’s people who live miserable lives because they were made to breathe carbon dioxide, but it’s all been turned into oxygen, so they just suffocate. There’s people who were supposed to live on the moon, and if they ever leave, gravity will crush them. No one really cares. I hate it.”

 

Gilbert let out a low whistle. “Wow. That sounds…” he shook his head. “I still don’t really think I get it, but it sounds bad. And I’m sorry. At least, if you want me to be sorry. I can also not be sorry if you want.”

 

Iszabella gave a soft chuckle. “It’s fine. I don’t expect you to get it. You’re from another universe. You’ve never experienced any of this. I hope you never have to.”


	4. Chapter 4

Back safely inside the ship, Gilbert twisted the wrists of his gloves to break the seal and pulled them off one by one. Next, he unlatched his helmet and wrestled his head out of it. “The damage to the right side of the hull is pretty bad. We’re gonna have to stop somewhere and get it fixed,” he announced.

 

“That bad, huh?” Iszabella replied.

 

“Yeah.”

 

Gilbert wiggled out of the pants of his suit, then unlatched the breastplate and pushed it off. It was easier to have someone else help put one’s spacesuit on, but they were made so they could be put on and removed without help. He’d tried to get Iszabella to help him, but she had trouble following and finding the clasps and seals that needed to be tightened. Plus, he’d felt weird about letting her help him put something on, even if it was as necessary as a spacesuit.

 

They were lucky that just a few hours later, Gilbert’s radar started beeping slowly, showing that something was nearby. He steered the ship towards it, and set the acceleration as high as it could go. He assumed he’d be able to refuel once he reached his destination.

 

As they got closer, Iszabella, too, noticed their destination. It wasn’t all that large when it came to cosmic objects, but it seemed big enough to land on. They got closer and closer, and she felt herself being pressed harder against her seat as Gilbert landed the ship. It touched down with a few bumps, before sputtering to a stop and sagging to the side where it was most damaged. A muffled voice came over an intercom outside of the ship, and said, “Welcome to the last refueling station in the solar system. Please wait while we connect you to a pressurized module.”

 

Iszabella unclipped her belt and gingerly stood up, pressing her uninjured hand onto her seat for balance. It was strange to experience gravity again, even if it was barely one-hundredth of Earth’s. 

 

There was the sound of rusted gears turning outside the ship, and something hit against its belly. Then came the unmistakable sound of air rushing towards them. After a few seconds came a sucking sound, then silence.

 

“Pressurization complete. You may now leave your ship.”

 

Iszabella stumbled forward, trying to go in the direction of the airlock. A pair of hands caught her and steadied her, then she felt an arm wrap around her. Gilbert easily balanced nearly all of her weight because the low gravity made her so light. He walked her down the curved bottom of the ship, to the back, and shoved a door open. Iszabella took in a breath and felt the sharp cleanliness of manufactured air. 

 

“So, where do you two come from?” Another voice came from in front of them.

 

Iszabella looked down and blushed in shame. “Earth.”

 

“Earth?” the man echoed. Iszabella nodded. “I didn’t know anyone still lived there. I thought it was condemned as uninhabitable.”

 

“It was.” She bit her lip and stepped back slightly. 

 

The man mumbled something to himself, then asked, “so what brings you here?”

 

Thankfully, Gilbert answered this time. “We ran into a black hole. I need to fix my ship and get her fueled up.”

 

“Alright. Where are you planning on going next? Our fuel’s only gonna last you around three light years at max.”

 

“Oh, just arou-”

 

“Pluto.” Iszabella cut in. “We’re going to Pluto.”

 

The man chuckled. “Oh, I see, you two are hippies. Now, let’s get you both something to eat. Especially you there, miss. You look like you’ve never eaten a good meal in your life.”

 

Iszabella shrunk down in embarrassment, but nevertheless she let Gilbert help her down the bridge, into a larger room. He led her to a chair and she reflexively sat down, feeling him slide his arm off of her and loudly flop into the chair next to her.

 

“Pluto? What’s Pluto? And why are we hippies?” Gilbert asked, once the man was out of earshot.

 

“It’s a planet. It’s at the end of the solar system. It’s supposed to be the place for when you want to get away from all the technology and the resource mining. It’s peaceful there, they don’t care where you’re from or what kind of genmod you are. I guess we’re hippies because we- I want to go there.” Iszabella drew her legs up to her chest and rested her chin on her knees. “It’s hard to live there. It’s cold and small and there aren’t any luxuries. But it’s better than Earth.”

 

“Oh,” said Gilbert softly. He really didn’t know what to say and he didn’t want to offend Iszabella any more than she already was, so he shut his mouth and waited for the man to return.

 

When he did, he came with two trays of food and set them down on the table. There was a plate with what looked to be some kind of meat and sauce, a pile of buttered green vegetables, and a strange brown mush. Iszabella took a second to find her fork, and she picked over the meal, pushing sauce off of her meat and eating it in small bites. Gilbert took a bite of the meat as well, and it was nothing like anything he’d ever tasted. 

 

Iszabella must have known that the food would be unfamiliar to him, so she explained, “it’s all genmod. They took cells from the last cows and cloned them, then they just grow them into meat. Same with the potatoes.”

 

Gilbert frowned down at the food, and it suddenly seemed less appealing. “You never eat real animals?”

 

Iszabella shook her head. “No. The meat animals have all gone extinct. We only keep them around if the whole living animal is useful, like companions. It’s more humane that way, nothing has to suffer.”

 

Gilbert started on the greens instead. They were bitter, but at least they weren’t grown in a petri dish. He swallowed a mouthful and looked over at Iszabella. She was pushing her food around on her plate, mixing the meat and the potatoes. He hesitated, before curiosity got the better of him and he asked, “were there animals on Earth?” Iszabella nodded forcefully and tensed her shoulders. “Oh… You don’t have to talk about Earth if you don’t want to,” he mumbled, and watched Iszabella turn away more, scraping her fork more forcefully through her food until she’d pushed some of it off the plate.

 

Iszabella dropped her fork onto the plate with a soft clatter and shrank back into the chair with her arms crossed over her chest. “I’m tired… I want to go to bed.” She stood up and lost her balance, making her sway forward. Gilbert quickly leapt up and caught her.

 

“Hey, are there rooms here?” Gilbert asked the man. “I think we both need to get some rest before we can start to get my ship back in order.”

 

The man nodded and led them down yet another small hallway. Iszabella shuffled her feet uselessly and Gilbert held her steady, practically pulling her along with him. He glanced over at her a few times and could see her lips pursed and green eyes simmering with anger and hurt. The man opened a door for them and gestured for them to enter the room. It was sparsely furnished, with just two twin beds and a small nightstand. 

 

“Bathrooms are down the hall,” the man informed them, before closing the door and leaving the two alone.

 

Iszabella sat down on the bed and Gilbert sat across from her. He kept his mouth shut, even though he was itching to say something to fill the silence or to ask if she was mad at him, even though he already knew she was. She kicked off her shoes and turned to lay on her back with her arms crossed over her chest.

 

“Stupid… why the hell did I say I was from Earth,” she mumbled, more to herself than to Gilbert. 

 

Even though he knew he probably should keep his mouth shut, Gilbert didn’t. “Come on, being from Earth can’t be so bad.”

 

“Oh you don’t get it. You don’t get it, mister ‘I’m from another universe, I’m so great’. Earth is where you go when you aren’t wanted anywhere else.” She sniffed and started to chew on her lower lip. “And now I’ll probably be sent back there. You said it yourself, you were going to drop me off as soon as you found somewhere to leave me.”

 

Gilbert sucked in a breath. “Look… I….” he paused and closed his mouth. There was no denying it. At first, he’d wanted Iszabella gone. He’d wanted to just move on and continue his journey, and she had stood in the way of that. Now, though, he didn’t feel as confident that leaving her off somewhere would be the right thing to do. Plus, she’d saved him from being sucked into a black hole. He owed her his life.

 

More sniffling came from next to him and Gilbert watched Iszabella turn away from him and curl up with her knees against her chest. 

 

“I just wanted to get away from there. I hated it so much, I couldn’t do anything and I wasn’t allowed around anyone except the caretakers and I would have just had to become one of them,” she sobbed.

 

Gilbert got up and went to sit on her bed. She scooted farther away from him, cheeks reddening with embarrassment. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know you then, okay? I didn’t think.”

 

“Too late.”

 

“I’m really sorry. I- how about I take you to Pluto. As soon as my ship is running again I’ll find out how to get there and you can go and start your life over.”

 

“I don’t have anything. Everything was lost when I crashed into you. I don’t have money or other clothes or anything. I don’t even…” she hid her face in her hands and shook her head, then mumbled again, “it’s just too late.”

 

Gilbert frowned. He wanted to protest that it wasn’t his fault he’d crashed into her ship, that it had been an accident, but this wasn’t the time. 

 

“I don’t have anyone to go back to, Gilbert. I have nothing.”

 

“What do you mean? What about your family?”

 

Iszabella stiffened and clenched her jaw. “They gave me up,” she muttered, angry, “and you destroyed the last memory I had of them.”

 

Gilbert didn’t need to ask to know why Iszabella’s family gave her up. It saddened him, though. He’d never met a blind person before, but he knew they existed where he came from, and they were never pushed away by their families or rejected by society. They were just seen as a fact of life. 

 

“I’m sorry.”

 

Iszabella shook her head. “There’s no point in apologizing.”

 

“My parents… well… they didn’t do anything bad like yours did, but my dad died when I was a kid. We buried an empty casket because he was shot down in a plane and it set on fire and he was burned up to nothing. My mom stopped caring after that. She just couldn’t keep living life and I had to take her place and take care of my little brother. She’s still alive, but she’s not herself. I left my little brother, though. He’s old enough to care for himself, but I miss him. I know the chances are so slim of ever seeing him again, I just said goodbye and meant it like it was the last one.”

 

“Oh.”

 

“Yeah.” Gilbert looked down at his hands then over to Iszabella’s, which were in fists just below her chin.

 

“You don’t know what it’s like, but I guess you kind of do…” she trailed off, biting her lip, still trying to figure out how she should feel about what Gilbert had told her.

 

She kept silent, and so did Gilbert, sitting with his elbows on his knees and his chin on his knuckles. Eventually, he got up, and went over to the other bed. He took off his own shoes and his jacket, placing them neatly on the floor, then got under the blankets and turned out the light.

 

“Good night,” he said.

 

“Night.” Iszabella replied. She closed her eyes and turned until she was in a more comfortable position. Maybe all she needed was a good night’s rest, and everything would be alright in the morning. She sure hoped so.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so sorry this has taken so long. School this year has been a lot more difficult than I thought it would be, so I'm a lot less active than I'd like to be. I'm not by any means abandoning any fics though!

Iszabella awoke to Gilbert gently nudging her shoulder. She tugged the blanket farther up over herself and groaned. 

 

“Rise and shine,” he said, much too cheerfully for such an early hour.

 

“The hell is that supposed to mean?” Iszabella mumbled. 

 

“It means you should get up. And maybe be happy about it.

 

Iszabella groaned again and kicked off the blankets with an exaggerated sigh. “I’m still mad at you,” she said, but there was only a little anger in her voice. 

 

“I know.”

 

Gilbert walked back over to his side of the room and grabbed a plastic packet of water. He tore the side open with his teeth and sucked on it as he watched Iszabella get up. She was very uncoordinated in the unfamiliar room, and it took her some time to orient herself. She was at least able to walk without stumbling, now that she was more used to the microgravity. “I’m going to find breakfast. You coming with?”

 

Gilbert got up and followed Iszabella down the hallway. She kept close to the wall, tracing her hand along it so she wouldn't stray away from the path. When the hallway tapered off into a larger room, she folded her hands in front of her and stood close to Gilbert. The room was filled with the slightly metallic scent of a just-heated readymeal, and Gilbert sat down on one of the mismatched stools scattered around the table the food was on. Iszabella patted around until she found a stool and sat down as well. 

 

“I took a look at the ship, that’s some nasty damage. And I have to say, I’ve never seen any ship like it. I’ll admit I’m a little out of the loop, but I had no idea we could build engines that powerful.” 

 

The man from the night before had come in and was leaning with his elbows on the table. He smelled of rocket fuel and oil, which overpowered the scent of their food.

 

“Oh, yeah, the ship’s actually-” Gilbert began.

 

Iszabella cut him off. “It’s a prototype. Brand new, never been revealed to the public. No one’s supposed to know about it. That includes you, you’ll need to be sworn to secrecy before we leave.” 

 

Gilbert nudged her roughly under the table, and she responded by lightly slapping his hand. She wasn’t going to let anyone find out he was from another universe, because she assumed some sort of technological witch hunt would start and she’d be captured in it and sent back to Earth. 

 

He huffed and turned to the packet of brownish-grey mush in front of him. It tasted like something reminiscent of blueberries, but with a distinct shadow of chemicals. Iszabella was eating hers without complaint, and Gilbert found himself wondering if she’d ever had any real food that wasn’t grown from animal cells or processed out of strange chemicals.

 

After he ate, Gilbert went with the owner of the refueling station to repair his ship. He’d been trained so thoroughly that he knew the ship inside and out, and therefore, how to repair it. As long as the engines and the matter-antimatter collision chambers weren’t damaged, he would have the ship running again in no time.

 

When he took the first step outside the station, Gilbert was immersed in the velvety blackness of space. On his first spacewalk, when he was surveying the initial damage, he had been too distraught to really appreciate the beauty around him. Now that the stakes were lower, he had time to really notice what it looked like through nothing but a visor. The sun was just a bright speck in the sky, and he was surrounded by other pinhead-sized dots of brightness. The closest thing to him was another large asteroid, and it was so far away that he could just barely see its outline. He was stunned by the beauty, but his heart was pounding as he realized how truly vast everything was, and how alone the people at the station really were.

 

“It’ll make you go crazy,” the man remarked, and put a gloved hand on Gilbert’s shoulder.

 

“How do you live out here?” he asked softly, eyes as wide as saucers.

 

“You read some books. You make repairs. You wait and hope someone will visit.”

 

“How long has it been since you last had visitors?”

 

The man shrugged as best as he could in his stiff spacesuit. “Four months. Maybe five.”

 

Gilbert nodded, still awestruck. He’d been lonely when he was traversing from universe to universe by himself in his ship, but it had only been for a little over a week so far. He didn’t think he would have been able to survive not speaking to another soul for months on end. 

 

The man began to bounce toward the ship and Gilbert followed. They stood on the right side of the hull, where the worst of the damage was. The ship would detect and patch a leak in nanoseconds, but the patches were meant as a temporary fix. Gilbert had to weld on sheets of metal so as not to risk depressurization. He worked for hours with the man at his side, and in the end, even though the ship didn’t look sleek and clean as it once had, it was ready to be flown. 

 

Exhausted, Gilbert stumbled back inside and clumsily removed the spacesuit. He found Iszabella sitting on the floor, some sort of fluffy white thing in her lap. When he sat down across from her, the white thing started squeaking and looked up at him with a pair of suspicious yellow eyes. He stumbled back and asked, “what the hell is that thing?”

 

“It’s a cat.”

 

“A what?”

 

“A cat.” Iszabella sighed. “I take it you’re not a cat person. Or at least, you’ve never seen one before. Touch her, she’s soft.”

 

Gilbert gingerly reached out and patted the cat. He was a little too rough and it hissed, then reached out a paw and scratched his arm. He yelped and pulled his hand away. “What was that for?”

 

“Yeah, you’re not a cat person.” 

 

They sat quietly for a moment, the cat making soft vibrating noises as Iszabella continued to pet it. Eventually, Gilbert spoke up.

 

“I fixed the ship, so I guess I’ll be going. Thanks for saving my life, though. I won’t forget that.”

 

Gilbert began to stand up, but Iszabella reached out and grabbed his wrist, forcefully pulling him back down. “The hell you are. You are not leaving me here to waste the rest of my life on an asteroid.”

 

“I said I’d drop you off at the first habitable place I found. Here we are. It’s habitable.”

 

“Barely,” Iszabella snorted, “I went out here to go to Pluto. You’re going to get me there, whether you like it or not.” She let go of Gilbert’s wrist, then sat up on her knees, spilling the cat out of her lap. She lifted her arm, and before Gilbert realized what she was going to do, she slapped him. “And this is for going around, trying to tell everyone you’re from a different universe. The last thing I need is for us to get taken in so your technology can be copied. They’ll send me back to Earth,” her voice began to get panicked, “and that can’t happen. I can never go back there.”

 

Gilbert pressed a hand against his stinging cheek. “Alright, alright, I’ll take you to Pluto,” he said, then under his breath, “why’d I have to end up with such a bitch?”

 

“I heard that,” Iszabella snapped. 

 

Gilbert stood up and Iszabella scrambled to stand up as well, aided by the bounce from the low gravity. She followed the sound of Gilbert’s footsteps until they crossed the bridge, back into his ship. Gilbert opened a compartment above the windshield and pulled out a wallet. He thumbed through it, frowning. “What kind of currency do you use here?” 

 

Iszabella sighed. “Ares. I’d have some if you hadn’t crashed into me and destroyed everything I brought with me.”

 

“So… we’re broke.”

 

“Yep.”

 

“Shit.”

 

Gilbert turned over the wallet, dumping the contents onto the internal systems board. He picked up a little plastic card and looked it over, then shook his head and put it down. He leaned forward to grab another card, and nudged a switch on the board. There was a whirring sound, then a metallic clank as the door to the ship closed. The ship beeped as it pressurized, and a smooth metallic voice said, “auto disengage activating in five… four…”

 

“What the hell did you just do?” Iszabella yelled over the sound of the engines firing. She stepped forward, reaching out towards Gilbert, but was thrown backwards as the ship blasted off. 

 

Once the roar of the engines had dulled, she distinctly heard Gilbert whisper, “oops, that’s not good.”

 

“What the fuck? You just fueled and dashed. Do you know what would happen to you if you were caught?”

 

“I have the warp hyperdrive. We can just jump to another universe. We’ll be fine.”

 

“No! You are not taking me to another universe!” Iszabella screamed. She lunged forward, kicking off the back wall of the ship. She reached out until she felt Gilbert’s arm and grabbed him tightly, turning him so she knew he was facing her. “You listen to me, and you listen good. I risked my life to go to Pluto. That’s where I’m going- even if I have to fly your ship there myself.”

 

“You can’t fly a ship, you’re blind. And besides, what would you even do to me if we went to another universe. You said it yourself- you have nothing.”

 

Iszabella scowled and released Gilbert’s arm. “You can’t do that. I won’t let you,” she said, softer this time. She bit her lip and balled her hands into fists, trying not to show how upset the idea of being taken to another universe made her, but when she breathed out she let out a small squeak and all of a sudden, without meaning to, she was crying. “Please just take me to Pluto. Please-”

 

“Oh no,” Gilbert muttered, then louder, “no, no, don’t cry. I’m sorry, I’m not going to take you to another universe. That would be a shitty thing to do.”

 

Iszabella hiccupped and rubbed angrily at her eyes. She felt stupid for getting so emotional. 

 

“Iszabella, I promise. I never meant it in the first place. I just wanted to scare you,” he admitted.

 

“I don’t forgive you.”

 

Gilbert nodded. He deserved it. 


End file.
